David Spindler's Great Wall

David Spindler is a self-motivated and self-funded scholar of the Great Wall, who has probably walked and climbed on more parts of the Wall around Beijing than any other living person.

Spindler first started hiking the Great Wall in 1994, when he was the only American studying for a master's degree at Peking University. He had always been athletic - at Dartmouth, he'd rowed varsity crew and was on the cross-country ski team - and he saw hiking as the perfect break from city life. At Peking University he wrote a master's thesis in Chinese about Dong Zhongshu, a philosopher in the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 24).

After receiving his degree, Spindler decided against pursuing a career in academia. For a spell, he worked as an assistant in CNN's Beijing bureau, and then became a China market analyst for Turner Broadcasting. But neither journalism nor business felt right, and the only constant in those years was hiking the Great Wall.

In the first public exhibition of his research, Spindler has collaborated with photographer Jonathan Ball to produce a series of large-scale, historically-based photographs of the Great Wall.

The photographs show parts of the the Wall where important Mongol and Manchu raids occurred in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, taken on the anniversaries of the raids, at approximately the time of day when the fighting happened. Each photograph stands over three feet tall, and stretches from 9 feet to over 30 feet wide. They are captioned with stories about the battles, drawn from Spindler's research.

Spindler says “These photographs put you as close as possible in the modern era to the point of view of people who attacked or defended the Great Wall during these battles—the vegetation is the same, the light is the same, the time of year and even the time of day is the same."

Danwei asked Spindler some questions about the exhibition and his ongoing work:

Q: What happened at the place in the photograph above?

A: On the night of September 26, 1550, a group of Mongol warriors took picks and shovels and pushed apart the unmortared stone wall protecting the gully in this photograph.

They suddenly appeared behind the main Chinese defensive force just east of this spot, surprised them, routed the defenders, and for the next two weeks looted, burned, and pillaged the northern suburbs of Beijing. The only extant account that quantifies the casualties (though certainly an exaggerated one) mentions sixty thousand Chinese killed, forty thousand taken captive, and millions of head of livestock lost as a result of this raid. One of the main Chinese responses to this raid was to rebuild much of the eastern sections of the Great Wall with mortar over the following twenty or so years.